Computer-aided design (CAD) programs allow designers to create computer models of products to be manufactured. Such programs can be incredibly complex and take extensive training and use before a designer becomes efficient in the use of the program. Natural language interfaces have been proposed as a means for simplifying many different human-machine interactions. While such programs are having increasing success in terms of adoption for general use, for example, the ability to ask simple questions like weather or direction queries of a mobile phone interface (see, e.g., US Pub. No. 2012/0016678, entitled “Intelligent Automated Assistant,” which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety), such systems still do not provide an adequate or user-friendly interface for many complex systems, such as CAD programs, that employ specialized language and wherein context-specific terminology has multiple meanings and/or multiple defining parameters that vary with the context.
While attempts have been made at providing natural language interfaces for CAD systems (see, e.g., US Pub. No. 2009/0058860, entitled “Method For Transforming Language Into A Visual Form,” which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety), such systems in themselves have been overly complex and have not produced results that have led to general application and use. Moreover, such systems do not provide flexibility and portability for use in the increasingly ubiquitous process of collaborative design.